If Ukip aren’t racist, how come so many racists seem to like them?

The most thought-provoking discussion about racism I ever heard took place five years ago on Channel 4’s Celebrity Wife Swap. No, it did. On the one side they had the former TV pundit and football manager Ron Atkinson and his wife Maggie, and on the other they had the former Olympic javelin thrower Tessa Sanderson and her husband Densign. Maggie Atkinson was the star. ‘Ron’s not a racist,’ she kept saying, with all the sincerity in the world. ‘He’s not. He’s just not.’

That’s all. Possibly I oversold it. The point was, this was about five years after Ron’s TV work had pretty much dried up, due to the way he had called Chelsea’s Marcel Desailly a ‘lazy nigger’ live on air. And what I wondered at the time, and have been wondering ever since, is how, in her mind, she could  square ‘Ron’s not a racist’ with that phrase. Because it’s some trick, that. It’s the key to the whole caboodle.

Ukip, just like Big Ron Atkinson, believes itself not to be racist. Until a few months ago, the party’s official description of itself on its website was a ‘libertarian, non-racist party seeking Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union’. Bit jarring, that ‘non-racist’ bit, not least because it’s presumably not lots of other things too. Marxist, Dadaist, exclusively philatelist, French, exciting in bed, an amateur female-impersonating dance troupe… hell, the list of things that Ukip isn’t must be endless. All it cared about, though, was that people don’t think it is racist. Which was a pretty glaring admission that it knew people might.

And indeed, plenty did, and do, or at least claim they do. Some of them, such as Barbara Roche, the former Labour immigration minister who was saying it this week on the front page of the Guardian, I doubt the party cares about all that much.